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This is a partner to the "Tabletop Politics" thread to discuss politics in video games. This is not the place to discuss Gamergate and you'll get smacked for it.
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Mar 31, 2022 15:57
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Project Itoh posted:A great many storytellers will be coming. That's right - Hideo Kojima's enfants terribles. I am one myself. Or at least, I would like to be seen as one; to be one. So, won't you also tell your stories without fear? I really like Hideo Kojima - I'll even admit to liking him in that slightly annoying, you want to grab literally any other book you can get your hands on and bop a Harry Potter type fan over the head while yelling "READ ANOTHER GOD DAMNED BOOK!" kind of way. I'm Kuckoo for Kojima. Couched in lazy, meandering storylines that span the chasm between Bond-style spy thriller, Bladerunner cyberpunk action, and dystopian futures influenced by the works of Huxley, Orwell, and Welles, Hideo Kojima has a lot to say - from the World War 2 and the development of nuclear weapons to the Information Wars and development of content-controlling algorithms of today, and into the eternally-waged Culture Wars there doesn't seem to be a major conflict he doesn't have an opinion on. Kojima first engages with the idea of Information Warfare in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In an end-game section of dialog that, if you're around the same age as me, was completely baffling at the time. You're already less than thrilled that you get to play as Snake for all of 30 minutes of play and then he gets relegated to a codec call character with an occasional on-screen appearance while you run around as an anime bishonen in a skintight wetsuit instead, and the storyline starts going in completely insane directions, the game itself is loving with you, and you just want to get back to the tactical espionage action you were promised. It wasn't until a later playthrough in my 20's that I realized the depth of what Kojima was getting at through that scene. For those unfamiliar: ip to a point not long before this discussion takes places, the player is operating and engaging with the game as though they're engaging with a "white hat" terrorist organization gone rogue on the cleanup site of a wrecked oil tanker (that was also transporting a clandestine type of new bipedal military weapons called...Metal Gear). The story up until now is presented to the player/character as the Solid Snake Simulation plan, an attempt to recreate the legendary super-soldier Solid Snake by exposing the player character to the same tests of combat and ability that Solid Snake was forged under. During this conversation, the true nature and name of the S3 plan is revealed: The Selection for Societal Sanity Plan. Under the S3 plan, the cleanup site housing the AIs would become a central "hub" of all digital communication where the AI would, at its discretion, filter out unnecessary information to stimulate the evolution of the species (humanity) - a completely autonomous, entirely invisible, unaccountable system of Information Darwinism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C31XYgr8gp0 Some particular salient bits from this sort of "debriefing" scene that I think are just as, if not more prescient today than when Kojima wrote the dialog include: quote:Colonel: But there are things not covered by genetic information. We see a lot of this play out on social media today - while I'd like to specifically leave the contentious nature of "does/did/should it matter" aside, I think the Hunter Biden laptop story is a perfect vehicle to examine Kojima's warning against. For whatever motivation (I would cynically attribute it to "preserving a social order that enables the continuation of unfettered capitalism", personally) Big Tech has taken on (or been burdened with, depending on how you personally feel about this idea!) the responsibility of being the arbiter of how individuals share information with each other. For days when the controversy broke, it was made nearly impossible by Twitter to simply share a story with another twitter user on the twitter platform. Someone, somewhere at the highest levels of Twitter decided (or more cynically, was told by their handler) that this story was such a serious threat to the continuity of the sanctity of our elections (  ) that it could not be allowed to spread - and then the machines went to work. The controversy was scrubbed from twitter almost instantaneously, and it wasn't restricted to only public timelines - users engaged in private threads with each other through direct messages were prevented from sharing the story as well.This leaves folks with lots of questions, I think - chiefly among them, who the gently caress made Jack Dorsey the arbiter of what is and isn't worthy of surviving informational darwinism? Were these systems already in-place and simply awaiting the command to be engaged? What level of manual review is involved, or are we dealing with AI's capable of rudimentary learning being "trained" on a sample of content to select for exclusion? And, frighteningly, have these systems been deployed before, and what "non-stories" were they activated against? Kojima ultimately ties this thread into Metal Gear Solid 4, in its iconic opening monologue: quote:War…has changed. How does this parallel today? Armies of recon drones patrol the skies over war zones. An instantaneous livefeed of battlefield conditions updated in realtime, fed back straight to the commanders safe in their bunkers at home, with "unnecessary" details like the fact that the thing we just blew the hell out of was a hospital stripped away for public consumption because it will only engender faithlessness in either the US military's capability or intent to do "good" around the world. It would weaken our image internationally if we were caught doing war crimes - yet we have, time and time again, and the context justifying it has been unfailingly manufactured each time. Bush won't be tried for crimes against the Iraqi and Afghani people because "it was bad intel, he just made the best call he could with the intel he was presented!" - to touch this back to MGS2: quote:Colonel: Ironic that although "self" is something that you yourself fashioned, every time something goes wrong, you turn around and place the blame on something else. It wasn't Obama's fault that hospital got bombed. It wasn't the fault of the drone operator that pulled the trigger. It was "bad intel." A completely formless, anomalous concept. Lib and let die fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Apr 1, 2022 17:46
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Hell yeah thank you for posting those quotes. I loved that part but really did not understand it at all at the time. Now it makes complete sense!
Harold Fjord fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Apr 1, 2022 20:43
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Harold Fjord posted:Hell yeah thank you for posting those qutoes. I loved that part but really did not understand it at all at the time. Now it makes complete sense! Yeah I was like, 13 at the time the game came out and for a long time relegated it to the trashbin of sequels because I cared less about whatever message its creator might have been trying to convey and more about executing the mechanics of the game. When the remaster collection came out when I was a bit older I played through it all again and it made a lot more sense to a more adult me.
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Apr 1, 2022 21:12
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It's really funny how MGS2 particularly is actually very direct about what it's saying, but we were dumb teens and it flew directly over our heads. Though I'll personally always enjoy that the antagonist at the end, such as he is, the President, uses two swords named Democrat and Republican
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Apr 2, 2022 17:22
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Mazzy can too be a paladin, and gently caress YOU
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Apr 2, 2022 17:45
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The protagonist of Enderal is a refugee fleeing sectarian violence in their home country. After getting screwed over by their smuggler they wash up on the country of Enderal, an island based nation which used to be the dominant political and military power in the region but has since decided it was better off isolating itself from the world and replacing its government with fascist theocrats. All the while there's an end-times prophecy going around that everyone kind of accepts to be true but the most powerful seem to be either ignoring or actively encouraging Then Cthulhu eats everyone
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Apr 2, 2022 17:57
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Trivia: There are more climate deniers on Android than iOS. I base that on the reviews of The Climate Trail: Android: 3.7 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wvolk.climate quote:This game is idiotic. Do you really think the developer cares about climate change? Every step of game-designing causes carbon to be emitted. Designing it, uploading it, the internet transmission necessary to download/play it, and the devices in your very hands that are playing it caused carbon to be emitted...but did this game actually inspire any of you to stop what you're doing and plant a tree? No. It's just a never-ending cycle of preaching and politics. Stop playing games and get to work. iOS: 4.1https://apps.apple.com/us/app/climate-trail-ebook/id1479119216 Note: Game is free, had no ads or in-app purchases. I did it as a advocacy effort and to get decent climate education into classrooms (the oil industry dominates that now). eBook in the game is pretty decent.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:02
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VideoGameVet posted:Trivia: Interestingly enough, when I was the kind of tech bro that would buy a phone based on my ability to find a cyanogen port on XDA forums, I'd noticed a rather large right-wing presence on the more social and less development focused parts of the forum; there seemed to be this sort of psuedo-libertarian belief that a rooted Android phone would "liberate" them from the tech overlords of Google/Apple and Microsoft (lmao remember Windows Phones?). I don't know that this correlates with anything, or is very relevant to the overall subject, but there's definitely some sort of "anti-apple" libertarian bend in the device world for sure.
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Apr 5, 2022 21:45
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Could that at least partially be explained by how much easier it is to customize/change stuff on non-Apple hardware? I thought the whole point of Apple devices was to hide a lot of the inner workings behind a shiny front, while a non-Apple device will let you tweak the inner workings more directly.
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Jun 12, 2022 15:35
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I don't want to say it's completely a libertarian thing, so much as a fundamental lack of trust in institutions or any form of centralized power. I used to be fairly, uh, fond of F/LOSS software to a self-destructive point, where even the package management of something like Red Hat or Debian/Ubuntu was simply too much to consider. Thus, I used Gentoo because even if there was still a centralized system for installing software, you still *had the code* and didn't have to rely on anyone! The system could be easily circumvented! This was very comforting. Developing things on my own? Well, how could you trust third-party code would be reliable and consistently available (especially non-Free software)? There had to be a fallback, or you'd best re-invent the wheel yourself, because what if it simply vanished tomorrow and you had no other choice? It's really a horrible way to go through life, and it's best addressed through therapy. You should not extend trust to everyone, but eventually you have to extend trust to someone, at least to some degree, and you have to make that decision rationally rather than based upon weird paranoias. A lot of the weirdest parts of our society at the moment have, at their root, a pathological lack of trust in others.
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Jun 13, 2022 00:32
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Lib and let die posted:I really like Hideo Kojima - I'll even admit to liking him in that slightly annoying, you want to grab literally any other book you can get your hands on and bop a Harry Potter type fan over the head while yelling "READ ANOTHER GOD DAMNED BOOK!" kind of way. I'm Kuckoo for Kojima. Couched in lazy, meandering storylines that span the chasm between Bond-style spy thriller, Bladerunner cyberpunk action, and dystopian futures influenced by the works of Huxley, Orwell, and Welles, Hideo Kojima has a lot to say - from the World War 2 and the development of nuclear weapons to the Information Wars and development of content-controlling algorithms of today, and into the eternally-waged Culture Wars there doesn't seem to be a major conflict he doesn't have an opinion on. i find it deeply suspicious that kojima released death stranding to lackluster reviews, and 5 months later the entire world went into lockdown and suddenly a bunch of themes from the game were super relevant
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Jun 13, 2022 00:52
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Apple approved this iOS game: https://www.facebook.com/LegendCityAds/videos/563518541812770/ Anyway it's a game who's ad features a "click to undress a sexy lady" sequence. This was sent to me by the former chairman of a game company I co-founded because in 2014 our game where you identify celebs from behind (clothed) was rejected by Apple (and Google) and it was a major reason why the company pretty much shut down by the end of 2015. So my son shared a link to most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John does a deep dive into Apple's mobile app store etc. So I told him: I’m still pissed off about this. That was a good app idea, abet silly. What’s worse is I can’t really do political games. Like, for example, a Tower Defense Game where you defend the US Capitol against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, this time with lots of machine guns and RPG’s at your disposal. Wouldn’t that be a satisfying experience?
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Jun 14, 2022 06:18
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VideoGameVet posted:Apple approved this iOS game: It's a bad idea to make a game explicitly about slaughtering your fellow citizens, even if you think they deserve it
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Jun 14, 2022 08:59
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Everquest 2's starting zone, "Timorous Deep," is the only interesting treatment of Palestine / Israel in gaming history.
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Jun 14, 2022 10:47
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A big flaming stink posted:It's a bad idea to make a game explicitly about slaughtering your fellow citizens, even if you think they deserve it On the other hand, we have six fuckin' thousand variations of Call of Duty, where killing other people's citizens is jim fuckin' dandy and very, very popular! What difference should it make if the pricks were born in the US?
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Jun 14, 2022 21:31
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PT6A posted:On the other hand, we have six fuckin' thousand variations of Call of Duty, where killing other people's citizens is jim fuckin' dandy and very, very popular! I was gonna say "political murder simulators are pobably not a great idea" but then I too remembered that CoD exists so that ship has largely sailed
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Jun 14, 2022 21:38
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Everquest 2's starting zone, "Timorous Deep," is the only interesting treatment of Palestine / Israel in gaming history. I only vaguely remember that zone and it's been a long, long time since I played EQ2. I think that was the starting zone when I tried to get back into it but it played like crap on my computer since the game was designed for single core processors. What's up with how it does it?
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Jun 14, 2022 21:52
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shimmy shimmy posted:I only vaguely remember that zone and it's been a long, long time since I played EQ2. I think that was the starting zone when I tried to get back into it but it played like crap on my computer since the game was designed for single core processors. What's up with how it does it? The Sarnaks are a persecuted minority on the mainland of Kunark. In order to safeguard their community, they decide to return to the land that they believe the Sarnak originated in - the islands of Timorous Deep. They've been absent Timorous Deep for hundreds of years, but the Aviak - another race who have been living in the area for as long as anyone can be said to have been living there - re-awakened this heritage by uncovering some ancient Sarnak buried inside one of the Sarnak cities they were inhabiting. They quickly form a military government of both Di'zok Sarnaks, Gorowyn (Local) Sarnaks, and political converts from other nations (humans, dwarves, etc) and set about deciding to further dispossess the Aviaks from both of their ancestral lands. When the player character arrives, they are given a series of missions by the Gorowyn government to dispossess the Aviaks (although the player case is frequently in the place of the "good Gorowyn" citizen, theoretically counseling against extreme measures that the government wants in the dialogue): 1) In a series of quests that are titled things such as "The Ends Justify the Means," you are required to stop the Aviaks from doing archaeological studies on their history in the area, and trying to convince NPCs that sending the army might not be the best response to Aviaks committing petty crimes like poaching. 2) In "pluck them of their pride," you are supposed to undermine their sense of pride in their nationality by killing "turf-hunters" looking for crab-meat 3) In a series of quests, the Gorowyn military advises you to use the conflict to do weapons testing on the Aviak civilians. After you test poisons / incendiaries on the Aviaks, this is reported to Gorowyn, which mentions that this is technically illegal and reprimands the person who commanded you to do it, while congratulating you for the consequences of the illegal actions. 4) The Gorowyn government is also trying to dispossess other natives of the area, but realizes that they can be used to further the dispossession of the Aviaks, who are the race they really despise. To that end, they offer cooperation with another local group in order to further alienate the Aviaks. 5) Gorowyn is not technically racist against Aviaks. After all, there are Aviak citizens of Gorowyn - it's just that when you talk to these Aviak citizens, they are incredibly marginalized, don't have the same rights as Sarnaks or members of other races, and kept poor, etc. Now, in the dialogue, all of this is portrayed as seemingly reasonable. The Gorowyn Sarnaks make the case that all of this is necessary for the survival of their people, that their history of persecution by the Iksar on Kunark is just another sign that they need their own nation-state to stay safe, that there are far more Aviaks in Timorous Deep than there are Sarnaks, so if the Aviaks were treated equally they would just overwhelm the Sarnaks, that they originated in that land and therefore it belongs to them, etc. Gorowyn is even portrayed as diverse - they don't kill anyone on sight, even Iksar! They are not cartoony villains, like Freeport or Neriak. But to be a citizen of Gorowyn and benefit from their government, you have to do something very specific: You have to make an evil character, whether through character creation or by betraying goodness through the betrayal quests. A paladin can buy a house in Gorowyn, but they cannot benefit from Gorowynnian citizenship. Even though the crimes in those quests are portrayed as sympathetic to the Gorowyn citizens, they are evil quests! Gorowyn is an evil government. It's not perfect, but Timorous Deep at least tries to have something interesting to say, which is an incredible improvement over most MMORPG zones.
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Jun 15, 2022 09:50
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So I’ve asked this elsewhere, but why are so many jRPGs about finding & killing God? Shin Megami Tensei, Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Drakengard, and bonus points to SaGa for letting us 1-hit kill God with a chainsaw. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jun 16, 2022 |
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Jun 16, 2022 13:42
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Confucius was an idiot imperial boot licker, Hideo Kojima is a much better hero
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Jun 17, 2022 11:22
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Triskelli posted:So I’ve asked this elsewhere, but why are so many jRPGs about finding & killing God? It's not as many as you'd think when you go beyond the best-known JRPGs in the west. Firstly you have to remember that especially when they were first getting made, the kind of person who writes a JRPG story is basically already a turbonerd who probably grew up reading a lot of Western scifi and fantasy stuff. Stuff like the Wizardry games were big in Japan and that's why they still makes games there like Etrian Odyssey. Secondly, 'foreign' mythology has the cool exotic factor that lets you mess with the specifics without your local audience caring much. 90s supernatural anime seems to think nuns are basically equivalent to Shinto mikos skilled in spiritual magic and cleansing, etc. Like how Western stuff goes digging through a bunch of Greek and Norse mythology today and changes up a bunch of stuff. "The seemingly well-meaning authorities are actually the bad guys" is a pretty standard story trope. Put all that together and if you need a 'well-meaning' organisation that is exotic and has a really powerful baddie at the top to fight, Yahweh's an easy pick. As far as the individual series you mentioned go: SMT was originally a book and then game adaptation just called Megami Tensei, 'Resurrection of the Goddess'. The original game actually had Lucifer as the bad guy! throughout the series, depending on the writer God is either well-meaning and mostly on the side of humanity if a little bit stuff about it, or is sometimes a tyrannical incarnation of Law. Usually there's a distinction made between 'YHVH' who shows up onscreen, usually as a giant face, and the actual 'Great Will' they serve who sits in the background and might be a bit better-intentioned. Final Fantasy: You don't actually fight God very often in these games! Usually you just fight beings who want to set themselves up as gods, which is a pretty standard villain motivation. Sometimes it's a gnostic thing again where the 'gods' are just imperfect servants of a more benevolent but distant greater being, or just the planet itself. Shout out to FF12's Occuria who are definitely tyrannical beings, but who you don't even get to fight. The best you can do is prematurely detonate their nukes stockpile so that they can't control nations by bribing them with nukes. Final Fantasy X has an evil theocracy in it but that's just a straightforward allegory for Japan being ruled by old traditional men who refuse to die while commanding the youth to die for them. Xenogears: Ah, well, this one is actually easy - the 'humanity' of the planet is actually derived from a crashed spaceship's biocomputer 'Deus' creating beings to basically turn into spare parts and repair itself. Near the end of the game like 90% of the planet's people turn into monsterzombies, and it turns out that was the plan all along and for them to shamble back to Deus and go fix it. So: godlike being, but not technically supernatural. Drakengard: You don't fight God in this one either! There's a weird life-cycle of evil flowers that make evil giant babies 'Watchers' and the Watcher-Mother but those are extradimensional evil beings and not actually gods. SaGa: I don't actually know this one.
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Jun 21, 2022 05:19
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A big flaming stink posted:It's a bad idea to make a game explicitly about slaughtering your fellow citizens, even if you think they deserve it Yes a bad idea but if we believe in Freedom of Expression, then we have to recognize that one person’s tasteless humor is another’s legitimate satire or even just a dumb joke. With the proper age restrictions in place, and clear content guidelines, there’s really no excuse to reject apps on the basis of potentially disturbing some people. Let phone users decide what apps they want, for themselves.
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Jun 21, 2022 06:08
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A big flaming stink posted:It's a bad idea to make a game explicitly about slaughtering your fellow citizens, even if you think they deserve it ...never heard of Grand Theft Auto?
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Jun 21, 2022 14:47
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Mormon Star Wars posted:It's not perfect, but Timorous Deep at least tries to have something interesting to say, which is an incredible improvement over most MMORPG zones.
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Jun 22, 2022 16:25
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Xander77 posted:It could be that no one gives a poo poo about Everyquest 2, but it seems like no one else ever had the same interpretation? I gave a poo poo about EQ2 to the tune of thousands of hours and I literally could not tell you a single thing about the lore of that game, it was more of an exercise in clicking through text bubbles and then killing x things
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Jul 8, 2022 17:40
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Xander77 posted:It could be that no one gives a poo poo about Everyquest 2, but it seems like no one else ever had the same interpretation? Excepting ESO and sometimes, to its detriment, WoW, I don't think a lot of people really try to "read" mmo zones. Which is a pity - several of them can be interesting. LOTRO gets described as "the mmo with zones where you steal pies" a lot, but it's also the MMO that begins its Dunland quest line by involving you in a ceremony where the the Dundlendings patiently explain the consequences of settler colonialism (including the environmental consequences) to you and then you desecrate symbols symbols of Gondor and the Eorlingas, and it's specified that the beef with Gondor is that they moved the Eorlingas in as a colony. And that's for the friendly Dunelendings! For EQ2 specifically, there's basically one person in the games history who cared to focus on the lore (as opposed to readings) and they gave up after an expansion came out that only had the lore in raids and also didn't make any sense unless you played EQ1, since the plot of the expansion was that they killed a raid boss in eq1 and his ghost was invading eq2.
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Jul 8, 2022 20:43
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bewilderment posted:
SaGa 1: Literally about killing God with a chainsaw (in response to discovering that the world the heroes live in war created purely for God's amusement). SaGa 2: "Gods" from other worlds are collecting powerful macguffins to become even more powerful. The heroes are chasing SaGa 3: Gods from "The Pureland" are flooding the world. The heroes have to use a time machine built by Sol "The Master" to stop the Gods from destroying the human world. SaGa: Scarlet Grace: The Scarlet Star (basically Prometheus) was punished by the Celestials, and returns 7 times over 700 years. The heroes chase after various side quests that all result in having to face and defeat him, though different ending scenarios imply they are going to try to become a god themselves or fight the Celestials (who also randomly appear as bonus bosses). I haven't played the other SaGa games, but killing God is a major plot point of the first three. Scarlet Grace is one giant metaphor for the fall of the Roman empire.
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Jul 10, 2022 17:03
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PT6A posted:On the other hand, we have six fuckin' thousand variations of Call of Duty, where killing other people's citizens is jim fuckin' dandy and very, very popular! Speaking of CoD, I remember the first MW being pretty anti-war - the SAS were a bunch of amoral thugs, the US military was a bunch of confused kids and it was pretty clear that everything was murky and pretty lovely for everyone Am I misremembering? I also haven't played any of the other ones but apparently it leaned in hard to OORAH OPERATORS IN THE SANDBOX after the first couple
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Jul 10, 2022 18:29
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Alctel posted:Speaking of CoD, I remember the first MW being pretty anti-war - the SAS were a bunch of amoral thugs, the US military was a bunch of confused kids and it was pretty clear that everything was murky and pretty lovely for everyone As always, anything portraying war has a hard time being anti-war, but I gotta admit "dying of radiation poisoning after a nuke goes off" definitely comes off as not very supportive of it.
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Jul 10, 2022 19:09
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Alctel posted:Speaking of CoD, I remember the first MW being pretty anti-war - the SAS were a bunch of amoral thugs, the US military was a bunch of confused kids and it was pretty clear that everything was murky and pretty lovely for everyone It certainly does have those aspects, but at the same time it still ends on the player and the SAS practically saving the world by stopping a bunch of nuclear missiles. Now you could argue that the whole thing was just a problem of their own making , but it still basically replicates the cliche of "Sometimes you need Hard Men doing Hard Things to keep everybody save". And yeah, the later parts absolutely run towards shameless and unambiguous US propaganda. The premise of the one before the current one a couple entries back was basically "What if the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, but this time all the war crimes are committed by Russia while the US and Brits are only there as well-meaning parties providing humanitarian aid and supporting the local freedom fighters". Hell, they literally showed the Highway of Death and called it by its name, but pretended Russia did it.
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Jul 10, 2022 22:07
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is spec ops: the line an anti-war game? i say yes, even if you play a "humane" protagonist you still end up killing a shitload of people to accomplish pretty much nothing at all
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Jul 10, 2022 22:43
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I only played a little and really should do it for real, but I don't see Valiant Hearts: The Great War as something easily misinterpreted. But I guess if you're going to choose a conflict to show the pointlessness of war without going far enough back that the motivations of the characters aren't recognizable to a modern audience, WW I is it.
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Jul 11, 2022 00:01
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I think it's interesting how the telling of the same general story shifted between Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII: Remake. I would say, in general, video games that feature violence are always going to have murky ethics, but in some cases at least, they have begun to show more self-awareness about those situations. I also happen to think that FF7R's cop-out that it was all Shinra all along was a bit weak in that regard since it showed the protagonists struggling with the moral implications of their intended actions, while implicitly absolving them without any consequence.
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Jul 11, 2022 05:41
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GhostofJohnMuir posted:is spec ops: the line an anti-war game? Spec Ops: The Line is about as anti-war as Army of Two- it plays like every other war-set third person shooter but quips about war during the loading screen, so, who's to say?
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Jul 11, 2022 11:04
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Panzeh posted:Spec Ops: The Line is about as anti-war as Army of Two- it plays like every other war-set third person shooter but quips about war during the loading screen, so, who's to say? "War is bad, but this one is specifically justified"
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Jul 11, 2022 12:09
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CommieGIR posted:"War is bad, but this one is specifically justified" In fairness, Spec Ops' pretty unambiguously states that the player character absolutely just made everything worse for everyone involved without any gain or even silver lining. In fact you could well read it to be about a guy who acts like a stereotypical shooter protagonist (i.e. just keep on moving forwards murdering everyone in the way under the assumption that this will somehow fix things) in a world that doesn't work by stereotypical shooter rules, which inevitably leads to massive pointless suffering. But yeah, it still has the issue that it needs to have its actual moment-to-moment gameplay be entertaining while also trying to say "this is actually bad". I'd say it manages that about as well as possible, but it's the same difficulty that almost all (anti-)war movies have. Hell, it's even worse, since games require the player's active participation to come to a conclusion, whereas movies "only" need them to not stop watching.
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Jul 11, 2022 12:39
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Perestroika posted:In fairness, Spec Ops' pretty unambiguously states that the player character absolutely just made everything worse for everyone involved without any gain or even silver lining. In fact you could well read it to be about a guy who acts like a stereotypical shooter protagonist (i.e. just keep on moving forwards murdering everyone in the way under the assumption that this will somehow fix things) in a world that doesn't work by stereotypical shooter rules, which inevitably leads to massive pointless suffering. To put it in perspective, one of Call of Duty's hallmarks, especially in the earlier games was in fact playing a lot of anti-war quotes in the load screens or when you die. The real text of a video game is it's moment-to-moment gameplay, not the Very Special Message at the end where it said 'lol, you played through the game but it's a shooter and you know how worthless that is'. It was an attempt to elevate a pile of poo poo(the Spec Ops series of budget shooters) with some writing, but ultimately, it's just the same pile of poo poo.
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Jul 11, 2022 14:33
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Call of Duty 4 is an interesting game in that it's really pretty negative on the US military but pretty gung ho for the SAS. The previous newest Modern Warfare is one of the few games I think you could call straight up racist towards Russians, which is quite the throughline to 4's bad guys, Russian Bin Laden and his son, the Tracksuit Terrorist. The first two Army of Two games were great and also completely trashy. No one played the third. RBA Starblade fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jul 11, 2022 |
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Jul 11, 2022 14:46
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RBA Starblade posted:The previous newest Modern Warfare is one of the few games I think you could call straight up racist towards Russians, which is quite the throughline to 4's bad guys, Russian Bin Laden and his son, the Tracksuit Terrorist. I noted that it took several real American warcrimes and applied them to the Russian military. In hindsight, however, it's hard to say that Modern Warfare wasn't accurate in its depiction of the Russian military's propensity for targeting civilians. The games themselves now look incredibly outdated because they envisioned a world where Russia could push to Paris, land on the eastern seaboard, or go toe to toe with NATO.
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Jul 11, 2022 14:51
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